IT'S ALIVE: Stop Saying Immigration Reform Is Dead

I jumped the gun last month when I wrote a piece with the unfortunate headline "IT'S OVER: Comprehensive Immigration Reform Is Going To Pass."

Obviously, immigration reform is on the rocks. But its death is being greatly exaggerated in the media.

Republicans and Democrats in Congress both have reasons to signal inflexibility on the content of an immigration bill, regardless of how inflexible they actually are.

Speaker John Boehner needs to convince Democrats that Republicans are willing to kill the bill without major policy concessions. Democrats, like Chuck Schumer, need to convince Republicans that they are willing to let the bill die rather than give up desired elements like the pathway to citizenship.

Jon Ward of the Huffington Post lays out how this needle could theoretically be threaded. It would involve replacing the Path to Citizenship which so alarms many House Republicans with something less, along the lines of Sen. Rand Paul's "No New Path To Citizenship" proposal.

You can call it a Pathway to Legalization—unauthorized immigrants would get the right to stay in the country legally and could pursue citizenship if they become eligible through existing legal channels, but would not get a separately established right to apply for Permanent Resident status after 10 years.

I spoke this afternoon with Sean West, Director of Eurasia Group's U.S. practice, who is reiterating his call that there is a 60% chance of immigration reform's passage this year. But he thinks the bill that passes may not involve a path to citizenship.

There are two key questions about this approach: Could it be acceptable to a majority of House Republicans, and could Democrats swallow hard and accept it? The answer to both is maybe.

Rep. Bob Goodlatte (R-Va.), who chairs the House Judiciary Committee and is generally viewed as an immigration skeptic, favors such an approach. So does Paul, who ended up voting against the Senate bill because of concerns about the path to citizenship and border security.

A path to legalization without citizenship would satisfy the needs of Republican-aligned business interests, which just want to be able to hire immigrant workers. And it could calm worries among Republicans wary of granting citizenship to members of a likely Democratic voting block.

Of course, Democrats have repeatedly insisted that immigration reform isn't comprehensive if it doesn't contain a path to citizenship. But if they're presented with a bill that serves most of their other goals, will they really turn it down? There are a few reasons they shouldn't.

Legalization would lead to a major advance in quality of life for unauthorized immigrants even if it didn't come with a path to citizenship. A substantial fraction of newly-legalized immigrants would later become eligible for citizenship through existing channels, such as marriage to a citizen or sponsorship by a relative, even without a special path.

Perhaps most importantly, legalization would bring formerly unauthorized immigrants out of the shadows and enable them to lobby for a path to citizenship in the future. Even the path to citizenship in the Senate immigration bill wouldn't lead to the creation of any new U.S. citizens until 2026. Democrats will almost surely control the whole federal government at some point between now and then, so if there's no path to citizenship in an immigration bill passed this year, they will likely be able to enact one later.

Of course, that reason for Democrats to accept a bill with no path to citizenship is a reason for Republicans to resist passing one. But there are still good reasons for House Republicans to feel they have to pass something.

Business interests and the Republican elites that align closely with them desperately want an immigration bill. They haven't given up: Grover Norquist, Al Cardenas and Doug Holtz-Eakin came out with another letter yesterday urging Boehner to pass something.

If the House doesn't pass any immigration bill, they will have to take all of the blame for reform getting defeated, alienating not just Hispanics but many of the top funders of Republican politics.

When I asked this morning on Twitter about the last time Republican elites fought so hard for something and got rebuked by their own elected officials, the proffered examples were not on point: TARP. "Plan B" for the fiscal cliff. This year's farm bill.

House Republicans defected on TARP and changed their mind less than two weeks later. When Plan B got defeated, Boehner had no choice but to let a substantively similar (actually, farther left) bill pass with mostly Democratic votes. Everybody expects the House to eventually pass a farm bill, too. In each case, the elites eventually got (or will get) more or less what they want.

If House Republicans pass a bill with no path to citizenship, they'll be able to accurately tell business interests that they passed legislation addressing their priorities, Hispanics that they voted for a bill that changes immigration in a way that substantially betters the lives of immigrants, and conservatives that they didn't just roll over to Democratic priorities. The politics are drastically better than not passing anything at all.

And passing such a bill would put Democrats in a challenging political position. Can Schumer really make good on his threat not to go to conference with a House bill that doesn't have a path to citizenship? If he did, he'd give Republicans an opening to credibly declare that Democrats killed immigration reform because they'd rather have a political issue than a law that advances many, if not all, of their policy objectives.

A lot of the discussion around immigration reform has focused on two possible outcomes: passage of a bill substantially identical to the Gang of Eight approach, or no bill. But the possibility of a bill that is more limited in scope and more attuned to Republican interests should not be discounted. Don't call immigration reform dead yet.